I’ve heard for years that you shouldn’t be using your Mac with administrator privileges. I agree 100% with this statement and I still use my Mac with administrator privileges. But to be perfectly honest, it’s just a little annoying. In the business, running as an administrator can certainly be against company policy and, depending on the environment in which you operate, you may not comply with industry regulations or customer contracts . But thanks to an open source tool (Privileges for macOS) from SAP, Apple-focused companies now have a great solution.
About Apple @ Work: Bradley Chambers has managed a corporate computer network since 2009. With his experience in the deployment and management of firewalls, switches, a mobile device management system, Wi-Fi connection Enterprise level, from 100 Macs and 100 iPads, Bradley will highlight the ways in which Apple IT managers deploy Apple devices, build networks to support them, train users, IT management trench stories and the ways in which Apple could improve its products for IT services.
So we’ve solved the problem: it’s ideal not to use an administrator account when using macOS, but it can be annoying as there are times when you to have to have it for various tasks that you have to do. Enter: Privileges for macOS. It is designed to allow users to work as a standard user for daily use, providing quick access to administrator rights when needed. When you need administrator rights, you click on the Privileges icon in your Dock to have it for a predefined period (by default of twenty minutes).
Privileges.app for macOS supports the following versions of macOS:
- macOS 10.12.x
- macOS 10.13.x
- macOS 10.14.x
- macOS 10.15.x
SAP and Apple have worked together for the past few years. A year ago, they owned 17,000 Macs, 83,000 iOS devices, and 170 Apple TVs. At this scale, they certainly know what they are doing when it comes to managing Apple devices on a large scale.
Privileges.app is a great solution, and the best part for Apple-focused businesses is that it’s free (Open source). The latest version includes support for dark mode, a notification center, interactive docking icons, supports 9 languages and is now fully manageable via MDM profiles. IT departments can set default failover limits or change administrator privileges permanently and immediately through the deployment of profiles.
Congratulations to SAP for creating Privileges.app for open-source macOS. They could have easily sold it to companies that deploy Apple products. It’s one of those products that, once you realize it exists, you wonder why Apple hasn’t integrated functionality into macOS and its MDM APIs. You can download privileges for macOS from the Github page of SAP.
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